Bellatrix's Funeral
by silverdoe21
Summary: Bellatrix Lestrange's funeral from the point of view of Narcissa :  Written for a contest. Please read, review and enjoy!


Draco was scowling, but Narcissa ignored him. "No one's even turned up, no one cares, let's just go!" The barbed words cut through her like a curse but she gritted her teeth proudly.  
>"She was your aunt!"<br>"She was evil and you know it!" Draco raised his voice and Narcissa surreptitiously scanned the empty crowd for listeners, always desperate to avoid any hint of scandal, now more than ever.  
>"Hush, Draco!"<br>"Why? Who's going to hear us?" Draco waved his arm lazily at the precisely arranged rows of empty chairs. Each spindly seat screamed an insult at her. The revulsion in the presiding wizard's lined face, the bare wooden coffin, devoid of flowers, the hideously echoing room – all attacked her dignity with their pointed silence. Draco was right. No one cared that Bellatrix Lestrange was dead. Most were happy she was no more. And she didn't blame them. But she did straighten her robes, hold her haughty head high and take a seat in the front row, where she didn't have to see the empty rows glaring at her.  
>"Why is father not here then?" Draco hissed, leaning over so the wizard rustling his papers at the front of the room wouldn't overhear their sharp conversation.<br>"He's busy trying to find a place for us in this society," Narcissa hissed back, "you know that without him we'd be lucky to even keep this house!" Her eyes flicked quickly to the marble colonnades supporting the intricately patterned ceiling and back again to the cold grey eyes in her son's own marble face. He rolled them and leant back in his chair, tugging uncomfortably at the high neck of the expensive velvet dress robes he'd been forced into as the wizard gave a small, sharp cough and rustled his papers again theatrically. His smug expression said plainly, 'I'm being paid well for this'. Narcissa pursed her lips.

She let the wizard's well-rehearsed words wash over her. They meant nothing. No empty speech could capture her sister. Her uncontrollable, untamed, foolish sister. She heard instead Bellatrix's cruel cackle; the one Narcissa had come to associate with torture and desperate, pleading screams. The echoes of the screams Narcissa couldn't pretend she hadn't helped to produce reverberated in her head and she was gripped suddenly by the childish fear Bellatrix never failed to instil in her as a child.

She closed her eyes and nine-year-old Bella laughed harshly in five-year-old Cissy's tearful face as she brandished their father's wand at her, threatening to use an Unforgivable Curse. She didn't know what an Unforgivable Curse was.

She was 7 years old, holding Andromeda's hand as they waved their older sister off to Hogwarts. She was filled with a guilty sense of relief as the scarlet steam engine rounded the corner and disappeared in a heavy cloud of smoke.

She was 11, and staring into Bella's proud dark eyes as the tattered hat was whipped off her fair head amid loud applause from the Slytherin table. She breathed a shaky sigh of relief.

She was 16, biting her bottom lip painfully to hold back the tears. Bella's dry eyes stared unseeingly in the direction of the elaborate coffin hiding their mother like a dark, hideous secret. Andromeda let the tears roll shamelessly down her cheeks and into her dark hair.

She was 17, watching from an upstairs window as her father threw a single suitcase into the light spilling from the open front doors. Through her dry, heaving sobs she didn't hear the sharp words Andromeda threw back at him. Bella's cruel laugh was unmistakable.

She was 24, biting back the tears again as the Dark Mark was burnt into the soft skin of her left forearm. Bella's dark eyes glowed with a satisfied pride and a dark pleasure at her sister's pain.

She was 43, watching with a shocked, helpless horror as Bella gave a last angry shriek and her body fell to join the rubble of the once Great Hall; broken at last.

She was 43, staring unseeingly at the coffin holding her sister's broken body. Gone too far. Grasped too much. Overdone it. _Power_, Narcissa thought too late. That great wrecker. It had taken her cruel, proud Bella. She pressed her fingers through the sleeve of her robes against the scar on her left forearm. It had taken Bella, and it had taken her too.


End file.
